The Golden Age Myth

Figure 1.1: Are movies getting worse? This interactive bar chart displays the average IMDb movie rating for each decade from the 1900s to the 2020s. At first glance, the blue bars are significantly higher for the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. This visual trend represents the commonly held belief in a "Golden Age" of cinema, where older movies are perceived as superior. But is this true quality, or are we just looking at the statistics incorrectly? This analysis will investigate that mystery.

Figure 2.1: Checking our data. Before we start drawing conclusions, we need to trust our data. This chart checks what percentage of movies in our dataset actually have the necessary information: a user rating and a vote count. As the consistent height of the bars shows, over 95% of movies from every single decade have complete data. This high level of completeness means we don't have to worry about missing information skewing our results—our dataset is solid.

Figure 2.2: The explosion of movies. Here we are counting the total number of movies released in each decade. The result is shocking: the film industry has grown exponentially. The bar for the 2010s towers over the rest, showing that more movies were released in that one decade than in the first 80 years of cinema combined. This "explosion" means we are comparing a tiny handful of older classics against a massive flood of modern content.

Figure 2.3: Popularity contest. This histogram shows the distribution of "popularity" as measured by the number of votes a movie receives. The tall bar on the far left shows that the vast majority of movies receive very few votes—often fewer than 1,000. Meanwhile, the long tail to the right represents the rare blockbusters that get hundreds of thousands of votes. This extreme unevenness is crucial: most "movies" are obscure titles that almost no one has seen, while our perception of quality is often driven by the few popular hits.

Figure 3.1: Comparing apples to apples. This side-by-side comparison reveals the first crack in the myth. The left chart includes *every* movie, showing the familiar "Old is Better" trend. But the right chart includes *only* popular movies—those with at least 1,000 votes. Look at what happens: the trend lines flatten out completely. When we stop comparing obscure amateur films against famous classics and instead compare popular movies against popular movies, the modern era holds its own. The "Golden Age" effectively vanishes.

Figure 4.1: The Superfan Effect. This chart introduces a "Vote Weighting" adjustment. The blue line is the raw average, while the pink line gives more weight to movies with more votes. Notice how the pink line drops significantly for the older decades? This suggests that many obscure older films have inflated ratings because they are rated only by small groups of dedicated fans or cinephiles, not the general public. When we force these niche favorites to compete on popularity, their average score drops, further debunking the idea of a superior past.

Figure 5.1: A flood of content. This line chart tracks the cumulative number of movies over time, emphasizing the sheer scale of modern production. We are literally drowning in content. The steeper the slope, the faster the library of human cinema is growing. This massive volume of modern movies makes it harder to find the gems, creating the *feeling* that quality has dropped simply because there is so much more "noise" to sift through.

Figure 5.2: The gap widens. With more movies comes more variety in quality. This chart visualizes the "spread" or variance of ratings. In recent decades, the gap between the best and worst movies has widened enormously. We are producing more terrible movies than ever before, but we are also producing just as many great ones. The "Golden Age" illusion comes from survivorship bias: time filters out the garbage from the past, leaving only the classics, while today we face the full unfiltered spectrum of quality every time we open a streaming app.

Figure 6.1: The big picture. This final visualization brings all our adjustments together. It shows how the "raw" rating trend (Blue) gradually flattens out as we apply our corrections for popularity (Orange) and sample size (Green). By the time we account for all the statistical quirks—survivorship bias, the superfan effect, and the explosion of content—the line becomes almost flat. The conclusion? Movies haven't gotten worse. We've just gotten better at counting them, and there are a lot more of them.